The finalists for the 34th annual L.A. Times Book Prizes were announced Wednesday morning: 50 books in 10 categories are in the running to win the L.A. Times Book Prizes, to be awarded in April. Two authors will receive special recognition: John Green with the Innovators Award and Susan Straight with the Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.

Bestselling young adult novelist John Green will be presented with the Innovators Award for his dynamic use of online media to entertain and engage. He and his brother Hank, videoblog pioneers, launched an annual combination video sharing/charitable fundraiser, Project for Awesome, in 2007. Their fans -- who they call Nerdfighters -- raised more than $400,000 in two days in December 2013. Green, who has won a Printz Award and an Edgar Award, maintains a dynamic relationship with his readers via Tumblr and Twitter, where he has more than 2 million followers.

Susan Straight, the winner of the Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, is a National Book Award finalist and a winner of the Lannan Literary Prize. In her novels, Straight has created and explored Rio Seco, a fictional Southern California town much like Riverside, where she resides. “Susan Straight is a Southern California original and a tireless supporter, and creator, of our literary culture,” Times book critic David L. Ulin said in the news release announcing the award. “Her novels opened up not just California literature but American literature to the Inland Empire and to the often-neglected voices of the people there. Through her work as a teacher, she has inspired a new generation of California writers.”

Finalists for the 2013 L.A. Times Book Prizes were named in 10 categories: biography, current interest, fiction, graphic novel/comics, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, the Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction, and young adult literature.

The winners of the L.A. Times book prizes will be announced at an awards ceremony April 11, the evening before the L.A. Times Festival of Books, April 12-13. Held on USC's campus in Bovard Auditorium, the awards are open to the public; tickets will be made available in late March. Details can be found online at www.latimes.com/bookprizes.

Current Interest Sheri Fink, “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital,” CrownDavid Finkel, “Thank You for Your Service,” Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and GirouxCharlie LeDuff, “Detroit: An American Autopsy,” The Penguin PressBarry Siegel, “Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom,” Henry Holt & Co.Lawrence Wright, “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief,” Knopf

Graphic Novel/ComicsDavid B., “Incidents in the Night: Volume 1,” Uncivilized BooksBen Katchor, “Hand-Drying in America: And Other Stories,” PantheonUlli Lust, “Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life,” FantagraphicsAnders Nilsen, “The End,” FantagraphicsJoe Sacco, “The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme,” W. W. Norton & Co.

HistoryRichard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, “FDR and the Jews,” Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityChristopher Clark, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914,” HarperCollinsGlenn Frankel, “The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend,” Bloomsbury USADoris Kearns Goodwin, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” Simon & SchusterAlan Taylor, “The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832,” W. W. Norton & Co.

Can we get to know writers through the places they called home? Mark Twain built a Victorian in Hartford, Conn., that was idiosyncratic and distinctive -- flashier than the house of his neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose fame he was said to envy. Edgar Allen Poe, often struggling...

Photographer Carol M. Highsmith is in the midst of a multi-year project to traveling around America, capturing how we live. Her collection at the Library of Congress contains more than 25,000 images, all in the public domain. Through her lens, her subjects take on a sparkling beauty, from the...

Jennifer Lawrence, the Oscar-winning actress who stars as Katniss Everdeen in the "Hunger Games" films, will portray real-life photojournalist Lynsey Addario in a film based on her memoir "It's What I Do." Steven Spielberg will direct.

Last week, by a vote of 26-14, the Kansas Senate passed SB 56, a bill that amends the state’s existing public morals law by striking an exemption that protects teachers from prosecution for exposing students to "harmful material."

Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel "The Buried Giant" has so far garnered mixed reactions from critics, with some praising the author for his foray into fantasy, and others finding the result "misbegotten." In a blog post published yesterday, fantasy legend Ursula K. Le Guin left little doubt...

Stephen King has a short story in this week's New Yorker, "A Death," set in the Dakota territory in the 1880s. There was a time when a writer who topped bestseller lists with terrifying stories of homicidal writers, sadistic fans and haunted pet cemeteries would not have fit inside a...